


Casting Off

by DameRuth



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Community: storm_and_wolf, F/M, Fluff, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-08
Updated: 2009-12-08
Packaged: 2017-10-04 06:40:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DameRuth/pseuds/DameRuth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A quote in a book, a new world and a kite; nothing special, but together they lead Rose to an extraordinary realization.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Casting Off

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [second round](http://community.livejournal.com/storm_and_wolf/tag/round+2) Nine/Rose ficathon at [The Storm and the Wolf](http://community.livejournal/storm_and_wolf) on LiveJournal; my prompt (#16) was the quote that opens the story.

_"A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea." -- Honore de Balzac_

Rose, curled up in her favorite overstuffed chair in the TARDIS library, a cup of tea on her knee and a plate decorated with a few leftover biscuit crumbs balancing precariously on the chair's arm, stopped and re-read that last quote.

She'd wanted a book that was easy to put down in case the Doctor ever figured out where he wanted to go today, light entertainment while she had her tea and biscuits but not much more than that, so she'd pulled a thick collection of quotations from a shelf and had been enjoying the mixed bag of little snippets. Some were witty, some were sharp-edged, some were sweet, some were even beautiful. But this one touched something in her she couldn't quite name.

She ran a fingertip along the printed line, taking a sip of her now-tepid tea, wondering who this Honore bloke was and what else he'd written. She might have to look him up.

Just then she heard the Library door bang open and a second later the Doctor loped around a corner, his face brightening as he spotted her.

"Rose, I know where we're going!" he announced, grinning.

He was so full of himself she couldn't help taking a verbal poke at him, even though she also couldn't help smiling back. "That'll be a first," she said.

"Oi!" he said, putting on a huffy face, though she could tell he didn't mean it and was playing back at her. "Keep that up and I'll take us to a rainy day in Hull instead."

Rose pretended to consider. "Hull might be nice. Don't they have a big fair there?"

The Doctor rolled his eyes at her. "Hull. All of time and space and she thinks Hull would be nice. When we could be going to the Onyx Hills of Oxatek . . ."

"Onyx hills would be nice, too," Rose said with a half shrug, biting her lip to hold in a smile. She gulped the last of her tea and set book and plate aside on the nearby table. She topped the small pile with the empty teacup as she stood, making a silently promising the TARDIS she'd come back later and clean up.

"Well, then, what are we waiting for?" the Doctor asked, back to grinning again, brimful of infectious excitement. He grabbed her hand and went bounding in the direction of the control room, pulling her after.

\--

The hills were definitely unique, Rose had to admit. They were rounded and rolling, treeless, covered in colorful horizontal strips of dense, low-growing vegetation. The "banded" effect thus created had given the hills their name and was the result of different microclimates, the Doctor explained. Morning fog filled the sheltered gullies between the hills (there was still a trace of it in the lowest folds of the land when they materialized, though there was a stiff breeze along the hilltops), burning off slowly through the day and creating a gradient of moisture levels that in turn led to highly-specialized plants growing within narrow elevational boundaries. It was a brilliant example of ecological adaptation and was textbook fodder across the galaxy.

By the time the Doctor was done with his lecture, it all seemed so marvelous Rose was almost afraid to walk around for fear of doing damage to such a wonder of nature. The Doctor laughed outright at that and strode boldly down the hillside and then back up to her as a demonstration. "You won't hurt 'em," he told her, grinning. "These plants might be specialized, but they're tough."

Rose, feeling silly, nonetheless took that as permission to explore the hill on which they'd materialized, brushing her hair behind her ears to keep it from blowing into her face as she bent forward to look more closely at the different bands of vegetation. Up close, they varied in far more than color; pale blue-green plants with fleshy leaves and tiny yellow flowers grave way to deep-green grass, and the next level down from that was covered in tightly-packed red-bronze rosettes.

Before she'd started traveling with the Doctor, she'd never have taken the time to look at plants like that, or appreciate how pretty they really were. It was a sure bet neither Jimmy nor Mickey would have had much patience with her dallying to do so. They would have been impatient to get to the latest gig, or the pub, or wherever. The Doctor, on the other hand, followed along, offering scientific names and random facts, as entranced as she was. They went as far downhill as far as the edge of the fog, but its chill damp was uninviting so they turned back to the sun and the hilltops.

When they crested the top of the hill, both of them tensed: they were no longer alone. A group of people (human-looking as far as Rose could tell, though that didn't necessarily mean anything) had appeared on a nearby hilltop. They were scattered in pairs and small groups, all intent on something; Rose squinted but couldn't figure out what they were doing until the first kite went into the air. It was a bright red wedge with two tails, and its pilot directed it in tight, acrobatic swoops. Faintly, the breeze carried the sound of laughter and encouraging yells as more kites of all shapes and colors quickly joined the first in the air.

"Fantastic!" the Doctor exclaimed. "Come on!" He grabbed Rose's hand but instead of heading towards the kite-flyers he dragged her in the direction of the TARDIS. He didn't stop till they were inside and had reached the second closet on the third level down, at which point he began digging inside it with a will. Rose helped as best she could, but she couldn't detect any order to the random items the Doctor removed and set aside, nor did she know what they were looking for.

With a cry of triumph, the Doctor finally produced a kite: an asymmetrical diamond of blue paper with a yellow ribbon tail, looking exactly like something out of a child's drawing or a cartoon. Rose laughed, understanding, and let herself be towed back up and out into the sun and breeze.

The kite flyers didn't seem particularly surprised to see them and they were welcomed with distracted good cheer. After a quick round introductions involving names Rose was never going to be able to pronounce, much less remember, everyone got back to the business at hand.

More or less. Getting their little blue kite in the air proved to be more difficult than Rose would have thought, given how effortless it had seemed for everyone else. All the while he fiddled and tried, the Doctor kept up a nonstop commentary about lift and physics and fluid dynamics and why a kite needs a tail to fly well, while Rose asked questions and offered advice, alternately teasing and encouraging. The first time their kite did a sharp nosedive to the ground, Rose laughed. The second time she started to, but at the moment of impact there was a brittle snap and one of the wooden dowels of the kite's frame broke in half, so she stopped immediately, feeling guilty.

She expected the Doctor to sonic it back together, but he shook his head. "Doesn't work on wood," he told her, frowning in concentration as he dug into his bigger-on-the-inside jacket pockets. After a few minutes, he turned up a pencil and a roll of sticky tape. Rose held the kite and let the Doctor hang strips of tape from her arm as he rigged a splint, scowling as ferociously as he did while working on the TARDIS. After a few minutes, the scowl was replaced with a wide grin.

"Good as new!" he declared.

"_Better_ than new," Rose said, bumping his arm with her shoulder, when the Doctor's very next attempt finally got their kite airborne.

It wasn't the sort of kite that allowed for fancy tricks and maneuvers like the others in the sky, but that didn't matter. It was enough to see it in flight, its yellow tail lashing as if it were alive, the tug and pull on the string surprisingly powerful for such a fragile structure. They took turns flying it while the Doctor regaled Rose nonstop with the history of kites and the clever or strange uses they'd been put to over the years. She wasn't quite sure she believed the story about Ben Franklin, but kept up a steady stream of encouraging responses.

Eventually, they decided to take a break and reeled the kite in. The Doctor checked his splinting job and made a pleased noise over how well it was holding. Then they flopped down, sprawling on the famous banded vegetation and watching fluffy fair-weather clouds drifting by overhead.

"Lucky we're here today," the Doctor commented, lying on his back and gazing up with his hands behind his head. "There's rain coming, the next day or so."

Rose, on her side next to him, propped on her elbow, squinted at the sky. "How can you tell?" she asked. She expected a lecture on evaporation and jet streams and climatology in response, but the Doctor blinked and looked taken aback.

"Dunno," he said. "S' just something about how the sky looks."

Rose couldn't help bursting into laughter, because it was so unexpected and so _him_. "I bet that's how all weather forecasters really work," she said, so he wouldn't think she was making fun of him.

"All the good ones, anyway," the Doctor said with a smile, and closed his eyes, the perfect picture of catlike relaxation.

It was rare for him to be this still, and Rose took the opportunity to study his face. Not classically handsome but handsome all the same, though his severely short hair didn't do his unique features any favors.

She felt warmth rising in her chest, but didn't examine it too closely and didn't try to find a name for it. She just let it happen.

More importantly, his face was expressive – incredibly expressive. She'd never known anyone who could convey so much with a lift of an eyebrow or a quirk of the mouth. Even now, when he was as relaxed as she'd ever seen him, there was a hint of a smile curving his full lips and hints of shifting, restless thoughts moving just under the surface, like ripples on still water.

_A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea._ The morning's quote came back to Rose full-force, hinting at the true name of the warmth she felt.

_Oh, no,_ she thought. _I don't love him, do I?_

She thought back over their day, flying a kite together. It was almost a date, but also the sort of thing a grown man might do with a child. Even if the Doctor was only the age he looked and not the at-least-nine hundred he claimed, he would have been twice her age. Old enough for her to be a child in comparison. Old enough to be her _dad_. But what she felt for him was definitely nothing like what she'd felt for Pete Tyler. It wasn't even like the hopeless crushes she'd had on teachers when she was growing up, the gulf or years between her and them an insurmountable barrier.

Nor was it like the wild (and, in hindsight, somewhat desperate) passion she'd felt for Jimmy, or the vague, comfortable liking she associated with Mickey. What she felt now dwarfed those sensations. It was huge, so deep it seemed to come from the marrow of her bones, but it was also _easy_, as effortless as living and breathing, and no matter how much it threatened to swamp her she wasn't afraid of it, not the tiniest little bit. It bubbled through her veins like secret laughter, making her first smile, and then grin.

"You've been staring for a while now," the Doctor said, out of nowhere, his eyes still closed. "Is there something on me? If it's a bug, flick it off. I can't abide bugs."

It probably should have been disconcerting that he knew she'd been watching him, but it wasn't. Rose just grinned more widely, that immense, secret feeling going straight to her head, intoxicating, making her bolder than she ever could have imagined being.

"Nah," she said, reckless. "There's nothing on you. I just like seeing you happy."

At that his eyes opened, wide and surprised, blue as the sky reflecting off water, but deep with Time and knowledge. Giddy, Rose met his gaze and never stopped grinning.

She felt so light: lighter than a kite in the air, or a feather on the open sea. If she let go, she'd be carried away forever. There were a thousand reasons not to give in, a million complications if she did.

One blink and the Doctor smiled back at her: a slow, spreading smile completely different than his usual goofy grin. As with all his expressions it transformed his face, gave a rare softness to familiar features she'd see go hard with anger, fierce with desperation, and cold with judgment. It was a smile for _her_, and it made her heart sing to see it.

In the end, it wasn't a choice at all; she tossed away the last rope holding her to the shore without a second thought and set sail into the unknown. _I love him. I don't care; I just do._

The Doctor was watching her closely, searching her face with tiny movements of his eyes. "The feeling's mutual," he told her, and her breath caught in her throat because he _knew_ but he was still smiling.

Then he rolled over and away from her, up onto his feet in one smooth motion, and held out a hand to her. "Enough lazing around – let's go find out where everyone's gone!"

Confused, Rose looked around and realized they were alone again. The other kite flyers had gone, and she hadn't noticed. All she could see were rolling, banded hills and wide blue sky. "Where _could_ they go?"

"Beats me. But I figure there must be a town around somewhere, tucked away; didn't look like our friends traveled far to be here, and I didn't hear any vehicles or transmats, so it must be close enough to walk. We'll stash the kite back at the TARDIS and go take a look."

Rose let him pull her to her feet. "Wonder if there'll be food there? I'm getting hungry."

"Fantastic! I'll let you buy me chips."

Rose snorted, picking up the kite and its spooled cord with her free hand. "How d'you know they've got chips?"

"I don't, but if we stand here talking, we'll never know one way or another, will we?"

"Good point." Rose shifted her weight to tug him in the direction of the TARDIS but he was already moving. They ran hand-in-hand, matched for speed, and Rose knew if she had her way, if everything felt this light and easy and perfect from now on, they'd run that way for as long as they could, for the rest of her life.

Forever.

 

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